TON Foundation Pumps $24 Million into Fueling DeFi on Telegram-Linked Network

The organization that supports The Open Network, Telegram’s blockchain of choice, announced on Friday that it has contributed another $24 million worth of Toncoin (TON) to its DeFi incentive program, bringing the program’s total value to over $75 million to date.

The TON Foundation originally created the program in April to encourage users to engage with decentralized finance (DeFi) applications on TON—a network that has thus become prominently known for popular crypto-backed games on Telegram and corresponding airdrops. 

At launch, the program featured 11 million Toncoin in incentives, a sum currently worth nearly $53 million. 

The additional 5 million Toncoin added today has been specifically earmarked to reward liquidity providers in pools on STON.fi and DeDust, two of the largest automated market maker (AMM) DeFi protocols running on TON.

In the program’s latest phase, users who provide liquidity in pools of TON and USDT, tsTON and USDT, or stTON and USDT will receive TON rewards. 

“The program is designed to establish optimal conditions for liquidity providers while stimulating the development of farming strategies on the TON blockchain,” the TON Foundation said in a statement. 

TON’s ability to scale from a support network for Telegram’s burgeoning mini app scene into a proper DeFi ecosystem was greatly bolstered by the integration of popular stablecoin Tether (USDT) with TON and the Telegram Wallet app in April. Now, TON users have the ability to park funds in a stable currency linked to the U.S. dollar. 

Toncoin, meanwhile, has fluctuated substantially in recent days, due to multiple factors including the recent arrest and indictment in France of Telegram CEO Pavel Durov over the app’s alleged lack of cooperation with law enforcement, and several instances in which the network has been plagued by outages.

At a current price of $4.80 as of this writing, TON is down by 27% over the past two weeks.

Edited by Andrew Hayward